Otto Matic 9+

I loved playing this game as a little kid and I’ve even looked into Power Mac emulation in an effort to somehow play it again. So I was floored when I saw that this game was in the iOS store and had controller support. It seems like this game is rendered at native resolution or something very sharp on my 2020 iPad Pro, and it also appears that the game targets 60 fps and often hits that, but it’s hard to tell.
However, playing this again has made me realize that there were some glaring omissions in the gameplay. The biggest one is by far the complete lack of any camera control. The right joystick does nothing, but how I wish it did! At one point, I was fighting this giant machine boss thing, and I had to just shoot at the general direction of where it might be because the camera was turned away from it and there was no way to fix that. The other issues are smaller, like the way that there are many invisible barriers that your gun can’t shoot through (like by item boxes), but enemies can shoot through those same barriers and hit you, making for some frustrating gameplay. I could go on, but really, if the camera were fixed, this game would hold up far better against today’s 3D games. All that being said, I have deep respect for the developer keeping his games playable on these newer platforms so that they can live on in a playable state. Thanks!

Where is the sound??

i grew up playing pangea games on my elementary school computers, so when I saw they had been ported to mobile I was super excited. Otto Matic’s mobile controls are pretty OK, the weapon swap works fine and the button size/placement works well. unfortunately there is no “turn around” command which is pretty irritating on mobile given the way you move is already hard. reorienting yourself can be annoying, which could be solved with an additional d-pad for camera view or adding a double tap on the movement dpad for quick turnaround. already gave up level two because of the river ride magnet glitching lol. yet to find out if there’s a level skip to quickly catch up to where you were or play a favorite level as there was on desktop. but despite that ill probably still play because its a classic to me. it’s just not the best—be aware of that if you’re looking for the same feel as OG on old Mac computers.